This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

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Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

"Naz and Maalik": FBI and NYPD mistakenly track two young gay Muslim men in Brooklyn as possible terrorists

The film presents two young African Muslim young men (played
by Kerwin Johnson, Jr. and Curtis Cook, Jr.) who, trying to hide their interest
in one another and in men, attract the mistaken attention of the FBI and
perhaps NYPD as potential terrorists. The men are fully observant, doing prayers and
attending a mosque.

The men are street entrepreneurs, working Bed-Stuy (filmed
on location there, in Brooklyn NY), selling lottery tickets, playing cards, and
incense. They are pretty self-confident
about approaching people to sell them stuff. One day, an undercover male cop
(Brian Bradley Custer) riding around with a female FBI agent (Annie Grier) approaches
the men and tries to sell one of them an illegal handgun. One of the boys actually tries to negotiate
the price down, Trump style, before saying no.
Nevertheless, the FBI agent keeps pestering one of them (“it’s a crime
to lie to an FBI agent” – and I don’t think it is).

The film (a crisp 86 minutes) tends to meander a bit until a
climax, involving a bizarre ritual with a live chicken that goes wrong and
causes an auto wreck.

I found the female agent’s behavior following the kids
rather preposterous, and her prodding unconvincing and manipulative. And the
male cop is clearing trying to set up entrapment with the weapon sale. I’m hardly convinced that the government is
really doing this. The film certainly makes a point about government’s
overstepping boundaries in the war on Terror, as well as about both racial and
religious profiling by police, a huge controversy today (Ferguson,, Baltmore,
Staten Island, Cincinnati, Utah, etc).

The on location photography is gritty, and I may have
recognized at least one person I know from NYC’s music community acting as an
extra in one scene.

The official site is here. The film played at SXSW and has been bought
by Wolfe.

The title of the film is sometimes spelled as “Naz &
Maalik”.

The showing was preceded by the eight-minute short “An
Afternoon” (“En eftermiddag”, 8 minutes, Denmark, by Soren Green. A teenager Mathias (Ulrik Wenfeldt-Schmidt)
invites a middle-school-aged looking kid Frederik (Jacob Ottenstein) up to this
room (or maybe the kid invites himself). They engage in chat with Skype on a
computer with young women, who can see from the other side that Mathias’s
motives might be questionable. The “AOC”
(the film in the previous review) in Denmark is 15 according to Wikipedia, so
this might barely be legal, or it might not be.

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